Real Time |Gods Unchained | Environments

I was hired as a Senior Environment Artist to undertake the creation and refinement of new and existing 3D assets throughout the project for Gods Unchained www.godsunchained.com/

When I first joined, there was a lack of pipeline, process, visual direction and quality, ranging from unoptimal asset creation and assembly, no streamlined or set process from asset creation to Unity, ad-hoc naming conventions and setup,inconsistent asset quality, no thought out master shader setups. I worked closely with the Art Director and independently undertook RnD and lookdev to drive the best possible solutions, outcomes and quality for the product and team.
I established this by starting over and creating a modeling and texturing pipeline. Creating set rules for naming conventions mesh layouts,, texture packing specifics, creating presets and export presets/rules.
Along side this was generating a master shader that all assets would use. R&D was undertook to establish shader features such as detail normals, emmisive masking, vertex animations, variations masking, lightmap|AO and many more. All this was to achieve the best visual impact while ensuring minimal texture look ups used to keep it as optimal as possible.

I also reworked how assets where created, by creating more modular/trim style approach to be able to render the board in the least amount of drawcalls as possible, most boards are only a couple of objects. The look of the sculpting was also important to capture a stylised look, but retaining some realism within the materials and textures of the assets.

A huge overhaul was the lighting system. I changed it from real time shadows/ao/lighting to a pre baked lighting system done in 3Dsmax. This not only helped with getting a specific look, but vastly improved performance all round.

One caveat was that any board could be loaded on either side in any combination, which means that the boards must not only have their own unique style and look, but also be coherent and feel like they are from the same 'world' as the others.

To ensure the art team would understand all the new process, direction and to alleviate any issues, lots of mentoring and share and lean sessions where undertaken.

*More boards will be displayed once being released to public*